Wi-FI Protected Access (WPA)

Wi-FI Protected Access (WPA) is a subset of the 802.11i security protocol used to improve encryption and authentication capabilities to the IEEE 802.11 standard. There are many weaknesses that have been found in the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, the 802.11 work group has been developing a security standard, 802.11i. The decision was made to take the stable parts of the upcoming 802.11i standard and implement them into a standard that would provide wireless security until the 802.11i standard was finalized. The standard takes these six elements of the 802.11i protocol and puts them together to increase the security provided by WEP.